


thick skin and an elastic heart

by perennial



Category: Mad Max: Fury Road, Practical Magic
Genre: F/M, Happy Halloween!, Modern AU, Practical Magic AU, a little bit fluffy for the fury roadians i’m sorry but lbr it’s a practical magic au/unavoidable
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-29
Updated: 2015-10-29
Packaged: 2018-04-28 17:26:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5099123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennial/pseuds/perennial
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He parks his car and strolls down the side path through the garden to the trellis and there she is, hacking a rose bush to pieces with a pair of bolt-cutters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	thick skin and an elastic heart

**Author's Note:**

> credit where credit is due: a good portion of the dialogue here is taken from Practical Magic (directly or modified) though i tried to keep it to a minimum, honest.

He parks his car and strolls down the side path through the garden to the trellis and there she is, hacking a rose bush to pieces with a pair of bolt-cutters.

“Imperator Furiosa?”

She looks up, squinting in the sunshine, a thin line of blood under her collarbone where a thorn caught her. “Can I help you with something?”

He holds out his badge. “Sure hope so. Name’s Max Rockatansky, Special Investigator, Citadel Prosecutor’s Office. Hoping you’d have some information on a missing persons case I’m working on.”

She pauses infinitesimally, her hand shading her eyes. “Sure.” She stands, brushes dirt off her jeans. “Why don’t you come inside?”

The house is as charming inside as out. It is an ancient Victorian but without the musty odor of Oriental carpets and armoires full of mothballs; all the rooms are airy and clean, and he can tell at a glance that the kitchen is the central room of the house.

Furiosa asks if he wants tea and he says yes, not because he does, but because he has learned that refusing offers of hospitality are often as good as asking someone to lie to him before he’s even asked the first question. He looks around, studying a photo of three girls, clearly sisters, though one has skin and hair as pale as moonlight and the others are darker, one with hair as black as ink, one with skin like nutmeg.

“Yours?”

“My sister’s. Her husband died, so we’re helping her raise them.”

“We?”

“My aunts live here too.” She sets out two mugs. He is used to Lipton teabags that taste like moss has been stirred into the water, but the smell that rises from his steaming cup is unlike anything he thought could exist. He doesn’t know plants, so he cannot distinguish one scent from the next, but it smells like what he would imagine home smells like, if he had one.

“What brings you to the Green Place?” she asks. Her gaze is steady and clear. She is a beautiful woman, far more beautiful than he expected her to be, but this is hardly the first time he’s had to steel himself against feminine magnetism. He clears his throat.

“I’m looking for your boss. Immortan Joe.”

“Not my boss,” she says. “Not anymore.”

He indicates her face, where a black eye is almost finished fading. “That his handiwork?” The son of a bitch.

“Mm. He hit me and I quit on the spot. I don’t know how much help I’m going to be, officer—I haven’t seen him since.”

“Tell me about your job.”

“You familiar with his business? I was a driver. I was good at it. Got promoted a few times over the years. I’d work a route for a few months, then be off for a couple weeks. It was a pretty good gig.”

A woman with hair as red as a fire engine breezes into the kitchen. “I thought I heard voices.” She pours herself a cup of tea as Furiosa introduces her as her sister, Capable.

He looks at the sisters, mentally compares them to the photo on the fridge. There is not an atom of family resemblance between any of them. As though she can read his mind, Capable says, “Adopted, all of us. Me, Furiosa, my girls, the aunts.”

He grunts. “Whose car is that parked out there? The one with the Citadel plates?”

“That’s mine,” says Capable.

“Yours. The war car.”

She glances at her sister. By the time Max turns to look at Furiosa, her face is placid and empty as a pane of glass. Never has he so wished to have eyes in the back of his head.

He says, “That’s Immortan Joe’s personal vehicle. Come on now.”

“It’s not her fault!” Capable bursts. “He practically kidnapped her!”

“Woah, woah. He kidnapped you?”

“All she means is that I had to work long days. Joe expects his employees to give their lives to their job. As for the car, I technically stole it,” Furiosa says evenly. “I never meant to keep it. When I quit I didn’t have another way to get home—Joe doesn’t let employees keep personal possessions on base. I just haven’t had time to figure out how to get it back to Joe. I’m not about to drive it back to the Citadel. I figured I’d hear from him about it but I haven’t, so he must be traveling.”

Max picks up a cloth towel and dabs at the line of blood beneath her collarbone. She looks up at him, startled.

He says, “So you don’t know where he is?”

“What?”

“You don’t know where he is?”

“Mm. No.”

“Let me show you something.” He spreads out a few photographs on the tall kitchen table. They are faces he knows well, faces that keep him awake at night, faces that invade his dreams and nightmares.

Capable joins them at the table, peering over her sister’s shoulder to look at the photos. Her manner is defiantly protective, he thinks. He doesn’t know yet if this is par for the course with them, or if it is an indicator that Furiosa has something to hide.

“This young lady’s name was the Splendid Angharad. Two months ago her body was found by the side of the highway. She had been marked with a kind of a skull brand, burned right into the back of her neck.” He shows them the other photos, young women whose stories are the same, only less recent. When he tells the sisters the women are all victims of Immortan Joe’s freshly exposed sex trafficking ring, they both blanch.

“Furiosa, you’re one of the last people to see the Immortan. Any help you can give me in locating him would sure be appreciated.”

They both nod. Furiosa picks up one of the photographs and studies it, her lips pressed tightly together.

He says, “Mind if I take a look around?”

“Be my guest.”

The house seems to go on forever. He doesn’t find anything remarkable. The car is towed away, but not before he scrapes up crystalline granules from the crevices of the front seat; this he ships overnight to a lab for identification. Then he gets to work.

-

Interviewing the locals gets him nowhere.

“Drinks gas, Furiosa does! Like a fish!”

“They sell their breast milk. The whole family, even the old aunts. It’s hallucinogenic, from the herbs they eat. Have you seen their garden? You should get a warrant to tear the plants out!”

“Those girls only wear clothes when they come to town. The rest of the time they run around in their undergarments, and sometimes not even that!”

Strange town.

Furiosa has a garden store on Main Street, and Max can see her inside from time to time, stocking things in the windows or talking to customers. Despite all the gossip, she does good business, and while many of the locals don’t trust her, others seem to take her at face value. He can empathise.

Sometimes when he is outside talking to people she’ll pass by on the sidewalk and his eyes will lock with hers. He won’t hear what anyone has said to him for a good minute afterwards, still blinking his way out of the image imprinted on the back of his retina, all electric green fringed with black.

This goes on for two days, until she storms up the sidewalk after him and demands to know if she’s under some kind of surveillance, and he doesn’t know how to answer that because he knows her story doesn’t add up but he feels almost as though he’s watching her for the missing pieces so that he can _make_ her story add up—so instead he invites himself to her house the next morning because he has questions for her but no time to talk at present.

“Fine,” she says.

He nods. “It’s a date,” he says, and strolls away whistling a song he had forgotten he knew.

-

The girls whirl around him in the foyer, eagerly asking questions and hopping up and down with an excess of energy he forgot belonged to childhood.

“Do you have a gun?” shouts the pale one. The Dag, he reminds himself. And Toast, and Cheedo.

“Mm-hm.”

They cry, “Can we see it?”

He watches Furiosa descend the staircase. She crosses her arms and tips her head to the side, smiling slightly at the chaos below. He looks down at the girls and shakes his head. “Hm-mm.”

Furiosa reaches the bottom and regards him expectantly. He looks at her, this woman who keeps adding another layer of doubt to her story every time he tries to peel one away. “Got a question or two,” he says.

He knows what the crystalline granules in the car are, but he stands in the sunlit conservatory and listens patiently as she explains their use as a sedative.

“Or a poison,” he offers.

She looks at him levelly. “So you’ve found us out. The crazy raw vegans whose natural remedies would kill any mere mortal. Our vegetables are twice as large as anyone else’s because we water them with mother’s milk, did you hear that one?”

He shakes his head in frustration. “I’ve got people telling me the moonlight makes your family telepathic, that you’ve got hallucinogenic breast milk, all kinds of weird stuff. I don’t know about any of that. From where I stand, I see: you, your plants, your knowledge of what they can do and how to make ’em do it. Don’t tell me if you didn’t want to poison someone you couldn’t.”

“Alright,” she says. “I won’t.”

She turns back to the kitchen, where the girls are at the stove making a mess with pancake batter.

“Imperator Furiosa?” She stops. “Are you hiding Immortan Joe?”

“Not in this house.”

He deliberately emphasizes each word. “Did you kill Immortan Joe?”

She opens her mouth to answer—and stops, her attention caught by something outside the window. He watches the color drain from her face.

“What is it?” he says, turning to look.

“Nothing. Trick of the eye.” They both jump when a gust of wind loosens one of the window shutters from its hold and it bangs against the pane.

“Hungry?” she asks him, and goes into the kitchen.

He follows her in and helps the girls make pancakes, answering the questions they pepper him with (Can he ride a motorcycle backwards? they demand, and he wonders where they get this stuff) and helping Capable carry the food out to the garden, never forgetting that she did not answer his second question.

Just before they sit down, a movement by the rose bush ( _odd, that; didn’t she just cut it down?_ ) catches his eye. A toad. Not just any toad, either—this one is the size of a bowling ball. Even as they watch, it gurgles slightly and retches up a horse tooth.

Max sometimes thinks he must know the design of Immortan Joe’s breathing mask better than the original creator did. When he picks up the tooth, he doesn’t even have to check against a picture to know it’s the one from the top row, third from the left. Where Immortan Joe is, there is his mask; his mask has been here, and was damaged, and was hidden. The implications are obvious even to those who might want to be blind to them. And he is through with her lies.

At the initial sight of the tooth she froze; now she exclaims, “Oh, I’ve been looking for that!” and reaches for it.

“What do you think you’re playing at here?” he shouts. It has been a long time since he’s felt rage like this, surging through him like fire and blocking his veins like concrete. The women stand frozen as statues. He points to Furiosa. “You better get yourself a damn good lawyer. And don’t even think about leaving town.”

The sisters look at each other; whatever message their gazes hold, Max has no desire to attempt to interpret. Out of the corner of his eye, Furiosa presses her right hand to her abdomen and grimaces.

He collects his jacket and storms out of the yard, up the garden path and onto the road. The walk isn’t long; the Green Place could fit in a back pocket and still have room to spare. At this pace he’ll cut the time in half.

He is only a third of the way back to town, still striding under the tall island pines on a one-lane stretch of asphalt, when he hears the rapid approach of footsteps behind him.

“The tooth was from Joe’s mask,” says her voice.

“Oh really!” he snarls. He doesn’t slow his pace.

“I know you knew that, but I needed to tell you.” She sounds breathless.

“Well I was serious back there, you best get yourself a lawyer before you talk to me.”

“I don’t want a lawyer.”

He does stop, then, and turns to look at her. She isn’t expecting it; she nearly collides with him. He catches her by her upper arms, and there is that feeling again, like his slanted world has settled.

He seats himself on a fallen log, elbows propped on his thighs, and pulls out a portable voice recorder that he fiddles with for a moment, making sure it’s in working order. He clears his throat. The rumble of his voice comes out a pitch lower than usual.

“Testimony of Imperator Furiosa, June the 8th, 2046. You gonna sit down?”

She seats herself beside him, slowly. He can see the pulse jumping in her neck.

“Where is Immortan Joe?”

Her voice is quiet but sure. “I think he’s in the spirit world.”

“You think he’s dead.”

“No, I think he’s haunting us.”

“Did you or your sister kill Immortan Joe?”

“Capable didn’t kill anybody.”

“Capable didn’t.” He leans toward her, pressing for the confirmation he needs and doesn’t want. He feels as though he’s going to stop breathing. “Capable didn’t but you did.” She doesn’t say anything. “Huh? Did you? Furiosa, did you.” He can see her sliding away from him as though swept away by an ocean current, her fingertips just beyond his grasp.

She jumps to her feet, starts pacing. “What if I told you I did? What would you do? Would you send me to jail for the rest of my life because the world was short a monster like Immortan Joe?”

“Not for you or me to decide how he should be punished. He has to be held accountable.”

“Well, he has been punished.”

He turns off the recorder. Enough of this. He doesn’t know why she’s come to him with the truth, and the part of him hungry for her trust is glad; but if she wants to hang herself, he sure as anything isn’t going to be the one to string up the rope. “Lawyer. Get one. Now listen…” She is watching him with those steady green fighter’s eyes. She is strong, she is smart—and she’ll need those strengths to get through this; he knows she can and will. But she’s got a blind side, being on the wrong side of the law as she is, and she won’t be able to guard all her weak spots at once when her adversaries start to close in. He says, “I know you’re in some kind of trouble. If you’ll trust me… tell me what you know… I promise you, I will do everything I can to keep you from harm’s way.”

Her green eyes search his. She is standing so close to him he can feel her breath graze his skin.

And then he is kissing her, wrapping his arms around the warm living life of her, pulling her body flush to his—and her arms are locked around his neck, her mouth pressed to his, hands in his hair. Who knows how far things might have gone, there under the pines beside the curve of the road, except—

“We can’t,” she gasps, “we can’t.”

“I know—I know.”

They pull back from each other, breathing fast. He takes three steps backward.

She’s shaking her head, says, “I don’t want to lie to you anymore. I didn’t want to even at the beginning. I’ll tell you everything you need to know, I’ll tell you how I did it, I’ll tell you where I buried him, I’ll tell you what I did it with—”

And he’s yelling, “Woah woah woah, hold on just a second. One step at a time.” He runs a hand through his hair, paces in a circle before turning back to her. “I took an oath to uphold the law. Thought I came here to bring in the bad guy because generally, that’s what I do. But you— _you._ You’re not what I thought. None of this is what I thought. But especially you.” _Let me help you. Let me keep the devil at bay._

He can read it in her eyes—it’s bad. Oh, it’s bad, and she’s a fighter but she’s got the look of a fox whose escape tunnel is burning and there are hounds waiting at the front door.

She says, “You can’t stay.”

He frowns, jerks his head in denial. “What?”

“You get involved in this, he’ll come after you too.”

“Thought you said he was—”

“I did.”

“You think I’m gonna just walk away—”

“Max. Please.”

He can see it in her face, despite her best efforts—that she wants him to stay just as badly as she needs him to go.

He grunts. “Well. Well, why don’t you do and I do what I do and we’ll see where we end up. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Max watches her back growing smaller until she gets to a dip in the road and vanishes from sight. Then he resumes his walk back to town, turning the horse tooth over in his fingers and scowling.

-

He travels light; there is hardly anything to pack. During his walk he came up with a way to answer for Immortan Joe’s disappearance—the tooth (and whatever additional parts of a duplicate apparatus he can get his hands on) will be discovered in a burned-out car wreck, the unfortunate leftovers of a collision with an oil tanker. He’ll have time to put the bells and whistles of the plan in place during his drive back to the Citadel. Good to have something to think about on the road. Better things to think about, these, than the lineup of faces that live within the photographs he carries. A victory is a victory, even one gained by irregular means.

He stops abruptly, pivots toward the window.

Then he’s running as though the fires of hell are at his feet—out the door, through the town, down the recently traversed asphalt road. Through the heavy oak door, up the stairs—and up, and up—and into the attic, chest heaving, heart pumping as though about to burst.

She is almost levitating. He watches, bewildered and horrified, as her body seems to separate from itself—and then the split figure registers, and he realizes he is looking at the immortal remains of Immortan Joe.

Her eyes slant toward him. There is a silver sheen at the back of them. “Max,” she hisses. “Everybody has gone out of their mind.”

Two women he doesn’t recognize are there, Capable too; the little girls must be safely holed up somewhere else. One of the aunts—he’ll later learn her name, Valkyrie—says, “He’s squatting inside her like a toad.”

The other, white haired and wizened, tells him: “His spirit is draining her life force. He’s feasting on her blood, trying to become whole.”

“What do we do? Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

“We have to banish him.”

“We have to force his spirit back into the grave.”

“I’ll get the book.”

“I’ll get the blessing seeds.”

The wizened aunt busies herself over a cauldron in the kitchen, making the banishment potion. The other three carry Furiosa downstairs to the living room and tie her to a chair.

“We want him as close to the earth as possible,” Valkyrie tells Max. “That’s where his body is. Dust to dust. To earth he must return.”

Capable says, “Girls! Get back in the kitchen!”

“Aunt Keeper needs more milk thistle.”

“It doesn’t take three of you to get it,” scolds their mother, but in the end she allows them to hover on the fringes of the room, helping her take down picture frames and vases and anything that might crash if the Immortan’s spirit shakes the house. Valkyrie lights dozens of candles, ’til there are hardly any shadows to be found.

Max does not move from Furiosa’s side. It is Joe’s spirit behind her eyes and Joe’s voice in her throat, but every so often there are flickers of her in her face, enough to simultaneously give him hope and terrify him. Mostly because she appears to have no hope at all.

“Stay with me,” he tells her. “Furiosa. You have to hold on. Don’t die on me, Furiosa, please.”

Her eyes are dulled. Sweat darkens her hair. She watches him, but he doesn’t know whose ears are listening.

“Ready,” says the Keeper.

They pour it down her throat, every last drop the cauldron holds. It takes all four of them to force it down. Immortan Joe’s screams of rage fill the house, and they seem to echo long after he is gone, lingering behind doors and in everyone’s mind.

Furiosa’s eyes are green again, but her breath comes out as a wheeze. She stares up at Max, her skin a terrible gray pallor. Her eyes close.

“No no no. No, stay with me! Keep her awake,” he orders the others.

There are a few things he’s learned on the road, and there was a time when it was necessary to be able to perform a blood transfusion. He has never been so thankful for his regular access to psychopaths as he is at this moment. The women run through the house, finding the materials for a makeshift port.

Max hooks himself up first, then her. They watch his blood race through the tube from his veins to hers. They all watch, hearts in their mouths, waiting for a sign she will pull through. It has to work, he thinks. It can’t be too late. Stay with me, hold on, don’t die on me, Furiosa, please. His blood drains out of his body and fills hers.

It is hot and red and lifegiving, and though some time will pass before she’s fully conscious, they are relieved to see the color returning to her cheeks.

-

“Hey,” he greets her.

“Hey,” she whispers.

“Hungry?”

She watches him take a huge bite of salmon, followed by half an orange. Capable has been busy feeding him blood-replenishing foods ever since they unhooked him. Spinach, cashews, raisins, broccoli, yogurt. He’s probably going to be sick soon, but she might need another transfusion, and he’s the only universal donor in the house. At this very moment, all he cares about are her open eyes.

“You’re here.”

“That’s right.”

“You’re staying?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re not going to arrest me.”

He chuckles. “That’s right.”

She settles back into her pillow with a sound of contentment. “I think we’ll tell the neighbors you like to fly off the roof. Wouldn’t want you to start out here without a rumor of your own.”

He is fairly certain that won’t be an issue, but he only says thank you and kisses her on the palm and offers her the last quarter of the orange.

She smiles and accepts.


End file.
